The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system delivers text-based alert and warning messages to notify citizens of imminent, local disaster threats and recommended actions. Although this is a promising new practice in emergency communication, research about how people respond immediately after receiving these messages in real time is sparse. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study addresses this gap by assessing people's reactivity to WEA messages using experimental simulations of an active shooter and an explosion on a college campus. Only about one in five message recipients took immediate protective action. Quantitative analyses and qualitative interviews suggest individual, message, and situational factors influenced protective action behaviour. These findings inform recommendations to create effective WEA and other text-based alert and warning messages.| 375 KIM et al.protective action; however, most previous studies have not looked at actual behaviour itself in response to these messages in real time.

Public health emergency planners can better perform their mission if they develop and maintain effective relationships with community- and faith-based organizations in their jurisdictions. This qualitative study presents six themes that emerged from 20 key informant interviews representing a wide range of American community- and faith-based organizations across different types of jurisdictions, organizational types, and missions. This research seeks to provide local health department public health emergency planners with tools to assess and improve their inter-organizational community relationships. The themes identified address the importance of community engagement, leadership, intergroup dynamics and communication, and resources. Community- and faith-based organizations perceive that they are underutilized or untapped resources with respect to public health emergencies and disasters. One key reason for this is that many public health departments limit their engagement with community- and faith-based organizations to a one-way “push” model for information dissemination, rather than engaging them in other ways or improving their capacity. Beyond a reprioritization of staff time, few other resources would be required. From the perspective of community- and faith-based organizations, the quality of relationships seems to matter more than discrete resources provided by such ties.

Higher scores on all four dimensions of ADEPT for organizational respondents suggest that more activities were conducted for inter-organizational preparedness in those organizations than in organizations whose respondents had lower scores. This finding implies that organizations with higher ADEPT scores have more active relationships with CBOs/FBOs in the realm of preparedness, a key element for creating community resilience for emergencies and disaster preparedness.

and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Preparedness Capabilities2 emphasize engagement between responding public agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs) as crucial in building community resilience to disasters. In considering an increased focus on cross-agency collaboration, community-and faith-based organizations, as well as other local or regional organizations that work with local health departments (LHDs) to improve community resilience, often view the public health department disaster coordinator as a partner in preparedness and response efforts. Local preparedness coordinators can be a valuable source for disaster readiness, response, recovery plans, and access to local resources.3 Therefore, it is crucial that these coordinators are easily reachable by the public and CBOs. To measure their accessibility, we examined how easy it was to find coordinator contact information for purposes of a national survey. FINDING DISASTER PREPAREDNESS COORDINATORSWe conducted a national survey of disaster preparedness coordinators at local public health departments to study their engagement with community-and faith-based organizations in building community resilience. To survey the coordinators, we used the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) database of 2,864 LHDs. We applied a probability-proportionalto-size sampling design to generate a stratified random sample of 750 LHDs.The sample list of LHDs we used did not contain the contact information (e.g., name, telephone number, or e-mail address) of their disaster preparedness coordinators. Therefore, the project coordinator and six graduate student researchers conducted Internet searches of the target sample of LHDs to find their preparedness coordinators' contact information. Next, we confirmed the coordinators' contact information by calling the telephone numbers obtained online. Finally, we telephoned each LHD for which we were unable to obtain